Showing results by author "Nancy McCabe" in All Categories

In this warm, deeply-personal, and often humorous book, Nancy McCabe re-examines and gains new understanding of her early life and her ill-advised marriage. Borrowing from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, how-to essays and before-and-after weight loss ads, a curriculum guide, Bible study notes, an obsession with Tom Swiftie jokes, and women’s magazine columns and quizzes that oversimplified women’s lives and choices, McCabe examines the many influences that led to her youthful marriage.

Nancy McCabe, who grew up in Kansas just a few hours from the Ingalls family’s home in Little House on the Prairie, always felt a deep connection with Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. McCabe read Little House on the Prairie during her childhood and visited Wilder sites around the Midwest with her aunt when she was 13. But then, she didn’t read the series again until she decided to revisit in adulthood the books that had so influenced her childhood.

Sixteen-year-old gymnast Elizabeth Arlington doesn’t care that her mother is older than the other girls’ moms or that she doesn’t look anything like her parents. She has too much to worry about like her body changing and how all of a sudden the balance beam is not as easy as it used to be. But when she makes a discovery that throws her entire identity into question, she turns to her ex-best friend Zach, who suggests a way for her to find the answers her mother won’t give her: a time machine they found in an abandoned house.